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Indeed. Hyperboloid cooling towers are exceptionally efficient which is why the nuclear industry used/uses them. Nothing special related to nuclear power though, just a good design. This plant certainly doesn't look nuclear.

No, there are plants that don't need cooling towers at all because of a sufficiently large heat sink. Cooling towers are typically necessary where there is not a sufficiently large heat sink. Ergo, it's an added cost to have to put unnecessary cooling towers in, and if you don't need them, they're not the "best" choice.

Yes, it does look more like a coal plant, but the same logic as far as design goes is the same. I work at a plant without cooling towers because our heat sink is large enough. I've worked at ones without.

Nuclear power is in fact a very clean form of energy sourcing. Except, of course, in the very rare occurence that they have a melt down. Those smoke stack over there though, NASTY shit. I bet it rains black in that area.

And even in the case of a meltdown, the containment buildings are absurdly tough. Three Mile Island's core was 90% damaged, 50% completely melted, and it released practically nothing into the surrounding environment.

Primary containment. That would be the pressure vessel around the core. There are a number of containment layers past that, none of which failed.

Unfortunately, the seawater circulation that was made necessary by the failure of the diesel system and subsequent hydrogen explosion meant that any volatile or soluble fission products - iodine, cesium, strontium, etc - would necessarily be dissolved and transported anywhere that seawater flow went. Meaning multi-MBq/kg contamination in the immediate surroundings and kBq/kg further out (even a few Bq/kg as far as Australia).

But that isn't possible in many places. Norway uses hydroelectric energy because their population centers are close to large rivers. Due to transmission losses through transporting power use of hydro is limited in almost all countries. In fact, only ~0.5% of Norways power is generated from wind power, compared to the US 2.3%.

Use the term "renewable", if you don't mind. "Green" doesn't really have a definition, and can be understood to be equivalent to "renewable", "carbon-free", or "non-polluting", depending on who you're talking to. You'll note, those last two don't exclude nuclear energy at all (at least, not if they don't also exclude wind).

That implies that "paid" means that not one person out of the thousands in the field of seismology will ever have an attack of conscience. It also implies that the entire field of seismology is dedicated to creating a theory of the subject that fits all publicly available data, while cleverly avoiding fitting the secret data. It further suggests that the dynamics of a hollow earth could even be simultaneously consistent with the publicly available measurements from seismologists, other geological fields, earthquake readiness sensors, etc and the measurements you'd expect from a molten-core earth - when we know those explanations are, from a measurement standpoint, mutually exclusive.

Worse, there is a pretty major problem with the hollow earth theory concerning gravity. The tensile strength of the crust would have to exceed anything we have ever known, or could theorize. Given that we pretty much already know what crust is made of, that seems more than a bit off.

As for reptoids, I'm going to assume it's a Poe's hat-tip, and I just got suckered into a fun little bit of troll-feeding ^_^.

About 70% of people across the board are mildly pro-nuclear - but largely don't seem to care - from the demographics I've seen. You get more antis on the left for some reason, but there's not a particular drive for nukes on either side.

4 days after the accident, radiation levels at the main gate of the complex were 11 millisieverts per hour. You have to get more than 1 sievert in a matter of hours to even become symptomatic....and bear in mind that by 'symptomatic,' I mean mild headaches, nausea, and dizziness. Real radiation poisoning doesn't kick in until much higher doses. In fact, the highest dose received by any of the workers inside the building was .67 sieverts, over the course of the entire disaster.
Furthermore, radiation levels fall exponentially with both distance and time, so I would feel perfectly safe if I lived in Fukushima.

As for Chernobyl....you're really going to stand there and say that because the soviets had problems, nuclear power is a flawed technology? The soviets didn't make it to the moon....I guess we should tell the Apollo astronauts that it's impossible. The Chernobyl disaster occurred because the RBMK reactor that powered the plant was poorly-designed, built hastily and without proper quality control, operated at too high a power level, and on the night of the accident, was subjected to a foolish test. Oh, and did I mention that the night crew consisted of students who hadn't yet gotten their engineering licenses, along with men who were known to be drunk on the job?

So, I suggest that you take a step back and ask yourself if you really want to be so reactionary when it comes to complex issues.

The external dosage is, as you say, not the worst problem in a case like Fukushima. Large quantities of Sr90 , Cs137 , I131 and other mid-lived alpha emitters in the food and water supply are the biggest health risk at the moment, and is already showing up in a bad way (like more than 1/3 of kids in the prefecture having thyroid problems.) Near field radiation levels does make things very difficult for cleanup and repair crews though.

Much larger concerns are:

3 reactor vessels melted down and currently bubbling away as they burn deeper into the earth, with no known way to stop that reaction

Close to 1500 rod assemblies in the cooling pool of building 4, which at one point was an earthquake away from collapsing (Tepco's been pouring cement into the foundations of that one at a rocket pace), plus another 1500 total in buildings 1-3 where the cores melted down, 1000 each in buildings 5 and 6, and the big ol' common pool with around 6400 in it. If building 4 collapses, the world is going to have a Very Bad Day™.

A building 4 collapse would be extraordinarily bad. Like "tell him about the twinkie" levels of bad.

(I love that graphic btw.)

Edit: To be clear, I'm not against nuclear power. I think the current way it's being done is fucking retarded (hey! Let's put a big ol' swimming pool 20m in the air and dump thousands of fuel rods in it in the most geologically active place on the planet! That sounds safe!) particularly when there's other technologies that could let us harvest that energy in a much safer and environmentally friendly way.

Agreed. I can't believe that anyone would ever think it's a good idea to put a nuclear reactor right on an active fault line. Japan is awesome at making stuff earthquake-resistant, but no matter how strong it's built, I would have thought that geologic activity on that scale would have introduced too much uncertainty into the risk/reward calculations for the project to move forward.

The twinkie's probably quite a bit smaller by now - a year is enough time to decay off most gamma emitters (for the most part, nuclei still excited about having taken part in fission), and there aren't very many in the secondary decay chains (which those emitters will be at by now). It'd likely still be deadly, mind, but probably from a much shorter distance.

If you're talking about doing away with nuclear power, then alternatives have to be explored. Deaths due to mercury and other heavy metals in coal fired power plants, environmental destruction of coal mining and hydroelectric plants... everything comes at a price.

When it comes down to it, to get the power densities we want/need, we need to do unsafe things. The trick is to figure out the least unsafe way that's sustainable, and do that.

The problem with current reactor technology in use today is that it's based on cold war technologies that existed primarily for breeding fissile material for bombs and only secondarily for power generation. Many countries are looking to make the move to Th232. Higher energy density, much more available fuel, little to no chance of being used to breed weapons, far less harmful byproducts and essentially impossible to melt down so no Fukushima style events. Check it out.

Nuclear engineer and plant designer here. Please proceed to go fuck yourself while I continue to enjoy the benefits of reliable 24/7/365 always-on carbon free electricity at steady and competitive pricing in one of the safest industries in the world.

More nuclear capacity is being added across the world than removed. Just this year, even with several plants offline, the US ADDED net nuclear capacity through uprates and worldwide several GW of nuclear power was added.

Yes. Nuclear is expensive compared to coal. That's why we've got so many coal plants and so few nuclear. It's, however, the cheapest of the carbon-free electricity and process heat sources. Since we've got a little problem with carbon right now, it looks attractive to environmentalists for that reason.

your previous comment: " Fuck you, and fuck everyone who supports that death-fostering lie of a power source."

I'm studying engineering, and I can assure you that we take safety very seriously. Inability to provide adequate safety constitutes flawed technology, according to any engineering society's code of ethics. By calling it unsafe, you are calling it a flawed technology. Semantics aside, you could not be more wrong. Nuclear power is entirely safe by any statistical standard. Like plane crashes, nuclear accidents tend to be very serious, and they are sensationalized by the media. Looking at the math will allow a more objective analysis of the situation. The world's first commercial nuclear power station went online in 1957. Since then:

Total worldwide deaths from nuclear power1: 4068; on average 71.37 per year.

Total worldwide deaths from air travel2: 67,114; on average 1177.44 per year.

You are 16.5 times more likely to be killed by the air travel industry than nuclear power. Is air travel unsafe? Hell, on average, two people are killed every year by vending machines3. Are vending machines unsafe?

Maybe you would say that nuclear is the only industry that can leave a place ruined for decades. I would ask you to read about the Centralia fire in Pennsylvania where a coal mine has been on fire for 50 years.

Same thing goes with the Deepwater Oil Rig which killed 11 workers and polluted the gulf for all eternity.

I think your real hatred is of industrial scale processes, which are large, dangerous, and require careful planning and execution. Sadly, these processes are the only way each individual can afford a cell phone, car, computer, food, and house. Regardless, out of all large scale industrial processes, nuclear is the safest, cleanest, most monitored, and most easily watch by the public and public activist groups (radioisotopes can be detectable on a parts per billion level). The nuclear industry will continue to perform safely will continue to invest in physics based safeguards.

I doubt you will read this, but I would be much happier if you hated industrial scale processes, chemical and nuclear, instead of picking on one due to fear of the bomb syndrome.

Why are you more afraid of ionizing radiation than non-natural chemicals for industrial processes? Why nuclear specifically? That's my question. Both are equally as deadly (chemical has cause way more deaths).

Are you afraid because you cannot see it or feel it?

Do you refuse x-rays at the dentist and doctors?

Are you aware everything from the ground is radioactive?

What makes you more scared of radioactivity than other harmful things, such as living near a coal plant, driving a car everyday. I'm curious...are you able to describe why?

I work around radiation quite a bit and it doesn't worry me more than handling a bottle of acid, or working with high temperature fluids, or operating a lathe....you just have to be careful.

No, that's not bullshit. It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's legit. Humans can (and, obviously, do) tolerate some nominal amount of radiation exposure. The total effective dosage of a banana is about 1 μSv by the time the K40 finishes passing through.

Radiation exposure is a complex topic, and yes, generally speaking, ionizing radiation is bad... but the ways you're exposed have a major effect on overall badness. For instance, an alpha emitter (like Polonium-210, say) can pretty much be held in your hand. The dead skin of your hand will absorb the alpha particles with no overall ill effect to you. However, if you happen to be a russian spy who ingests or is injected with that Po210, then every stray alpha particle is being absorbed inside your body, causing all sorts of wacky chemistry to go on internally and causing very bad things.

Same source, radically different effects. Considering your concern over this stuff, it might be worth your time to investigate more fully.

This is clearly not a nuclear power plant, those are steam reclamation towers from a circa 1970's crude oil refinery. Nuclear plants don't spew black soot and smoke into the sky, they don't actually burn anything.

Wasn't this pic featured in a old issue of national geographic? I remembered rummaging through some closets at my grandmothers and found a bunch of old Natgeos. They were from from the late 80's and 90's and one had some articles on what I think was pollution in some eastern European countries.

Lots of things other than nuclear power plants use cooling towers. One of the other comments identified the source of the image and mentioned that the facility in the background is a tire manufacturing plant, it probably has big vats of molten rubber and chemical reactors to convert oil and whatnot.

Big cooling towers like that just became iconic of nuclear power plants because nuclear power plants generate a lot of heat in a tiny reactor, so the cooling towers are disproportionately large and recognizeable next to the otherwise nondescript building the reactor's in.

All thermal cycle plants (Coal/gas/oil/nuclear) need to remove "Waste" heat from the plant due to limitations in thermodynamics and maximum efficiency. Some plants do this by taking in lake/river water then discharging all of the water directly back into that lake/river. But, if there are strict environmental limitations in place, or if the lake/river does not have enough ability to absorb this heat, you have to utilize cooling towers. A cooling tower lets you transfer the heat directly to the atmosphere, and you do not have to discharge anything to the lake/river.

These cooling towers are used more for Coal plants than they are for nuclear plants. Since regulations in many countries require large amounts of cooling water be available to nuclear plants for safe shutdown following an accident, many plants are in locations where there is sufficient lake/river capacity to handle all the heat they put out. In the US, only about 1/3rd of nuclear power plants have tall cooling towers like this (some have short stack or forced cooling towers, the rest are discharging directly to a lake/river). It just so happened that through one means or another, the cooling tower shape was associated with nuclear power. This association causes a lot of misconceptions, for example, the Michigan City Generating Station is a non-nuclear plant that uses hyperbolic cooling towers, however there are many people, even those that live around the plant, that think it is a nuclear plant.

Anyways, no nuclear plant will ever release anything dark colored into the atmosphere. So whenever you see a dark smoke colored release, you know you aren't dealing with nuclear.